Sunday, August 30, 2015

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) was an eco-wordsmith whose work is
often compared to the classics of Aldo Leopold and Henry Thoreau.His book Desert
Solitaire has been called “the Walden
of the southwest.”Abbey was born in
Pennsylvania, and went to school in New Mexico.In 1956 and 1957 he spent the summers as a ranger at the Arches National
Park, near Moab, Utah.It was a
mind-altering experience.The young
ranger fell in love with the desert, and kept extensive diaries.

Like Leopold and Thoreau, he had profound reverence and
respect for the natural world.All three
watched in agony as industrial civilization worked so hard to mindlessly destroy
it.While the other two were respectable
gentlemen, Abbey was a funny, rude, rowdy, loose cannon.

In 1845, Thoreau diagnosed the problem as a deficiency of
timeless wisdom and intellectual refinement.In 1949, Leopold recommended establishing a set of common sense rules to
discourage gung-ho American halfwits from obliterating the future.By 1968, Abbey was furious about the
absurdity of it all.Our culture was
insane.It was time to mercilessly beat
the monster to a bloody pulp, but the monster was winning, and it was shape
shifting into an invincible mass extinction steamroller.

At the Arches, Abbey’s ranger station consisted of a picnic
table, house trailer, generator, and pickup truck.It was far from the main entrance, and the dirt
road was dusty, primitive, and pocked with potholes.He spent the six-month tourist seasons in a
place of immense beauty, constantly in awe of the magnificence of this gorgeous
desert paradise.The multi-colored
sandstone had been sculpted into astonishing forms by a million years of snow
and rain.“I am twenty miles from the
nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness.Loveliness and a quiet exultation.”

The only turd in the tranquility was the daffy tourists,
determined to see every national park in two weeks.They yowled and whined about the terrible
road.They were Americans, by God, and
paved roads and vast parking lots were guaranteed in the Constitution.Many of these “wheelchair explorers” never
stepped out of their cars, except to take a few snapshots and contribute to the
litter.Where’s the Coke machine?

They were unable to comprehend the treasure that surrounded
them.Their spirits did not soar,
overwhelmed with amazement at the power of this sacred land.It was as if their souls had been
anesthetized by living in an industrial nightmare.They were like fish that no longer felt at
home in the water, preferring to reside on dry land and devote their lives to
flopping and shopping.

Worse, the vision of the Park Service was to update its
scruffy old parks into gleaming Disneyland National Parks — modern, clean, and
convenient.In 1956, President
Eisenhower signed a bill to create the interstate highway system.America had sold its soul, and its future, to
the automobile.Abbey was bummed.He knew that the Arches were doomed. After two summers, he quit, not wishing to stick
around and watch the inevitable wreckage of progress.

He was right.Several
years later, planners designed a new and improved infrastructure that would allow
the Arches park to accommodate 75,000 visitors per year — a vast increase from
Abbey’s frontier days.In 2012, the park
had over a million visitors.Traffic
jams, noise, and air pollution have become serious problems.

Anyway, the book contains a collection of stories and
rants.The most important story was Down the River,
which described floating down the Colorado River as the Glen Canyon Dam was
being built.Abbey and his buddy Ralph were
among the last humans to observe the incredible canyons before they were submerged
beneath the new Lake Powell reservoir.It reminded me of our generation, taking a final cruise through what
remains of the natural world, before it is composted by the unintended
consequences of our brilliant techno-miracles.

Oddly, the reservoir was named after John Wesley Powell, an
early explorer who actually loved the beautiful river.“Where he and his brave men once lined the
rapids and glided through silent canyons two thousand feet deep the motorboats
now smoke and whine, scumming the water with cigarette butts, beer cans and
oil, dragging the water skiers on their endless rounds, clockwise.”

Abbey and Ralph were delighted to leave modernity behind, “…the
stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable
arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating
and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars… the foul,
diseased, and hideous cities and
towns we live in…” and on and on.They
had sweet fantasies of spending the rest of their days floating downstream in
canyon country.They also had sweet fantasies
of blowing up the dam — fantasies that Abbey later expanded in his smash hit, The Monkey Wrench Gang.

The U.S. built several thousand major dams in the twentieth
century.These projects created many
jobs during the Depression, unleashed flash floods of political sleaze, and
made mobs of fat cats richer.Glen
Canyon Dam was intended to be a “cash register dam,” generating big revenues
from hydropower sales, which could then be used to pay for vast irrigation
projects.The dreams were far brighter than
the subsequent realities.

Hoover Dam was finished in 1936, creating the Lake Mead
reservoir.Today, this reservoir is at
37 percent of capacity, its lowest level since the 1930s, when it was being
filled.Farther upstream, the Glen
Canyon Dam was finished in 1963, creating the Lake Powell reservoir.Today, this reservoir is at 54 percent of
capacity.The flow of the Colorado River
has been below average since 1999.In 2002,
the flow plunged to 25 percent of normal and 2003 was a bit higher.

There is growing concern that falling water levels will eliminate
the thrust necessary to spin the power turbines at Glen Canyon.While water levels fall, sediment levels are
rapidly rising, as the river delivers 30,000 dump truck loads per day.Eventually, sediment will permanently choke
the power turbines.While many wring
their hands about the toll of ongoing drought, lots of water is also being lost
due to evaporation and bank seepage (water soaking into porous sandstone).Droughts can come and go, but rising
temperatures seem to be here to stay for a long, long time — and some believe
that this is the primary cause of falling water levels.

Up to 34 million people depend on water from the Colorado
River basin.The rapid development of
Cheyenne, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and San
Diego was inspired by a cyclone of magical thinking.Our well-educated nation suffers from a
pandemic of ecological ignorance, and critical shortages of foresight.

Abbey had the ability to stand firm against the whirlwinds of
magical thinking that constantly roar through our communities, making everyone
sleepy and dreamy.He understood that humans
were not above and apart from the rest of nature, that anthropocentricism was a
glaring symptom of lunacy.It was
obvious to him that new technology was best left in the box and promptly buried.The culture that poisons our worldview is
completely out of its mind.Where’s the
Coke machine?

2 comments:

Another, more contemporary, writer and philosopher of humanity's essential and visceral connection to the "more-than-human" world is David Abram, whose two books, The Spell of the Sensual and Becoming Animal, are among the best of this millennium.

David Abram (born June 24, 1957) is an American philosopher, cultural ecologist, and performance artist.

In 1976, he began working as “house magician” at Alice’s Restaurant in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, and soon was performing at clubs throughout New England while studying at Wesleyan University. He took a year off from college to journey as a street magician through Europe and the Middle East; toward the end of that journey, in London, he began exploring the application of sleight-of-hand magic to psychotherapy under the guidance of Dr. R. D. Laing. Abram traveled throughout Southeast Asia, living and studying with indigenous magic practitioners. When he returned to North America he became a student of natural history and ecology and was soon lecturing in tandem with biologist Lynn Margulis and geochemist James Lovelock, the creators of the Gaia Theory.

Riversong, thanks! That might be useful for some of the passing pilgrims here. I’ve tried reading him several times. I suspect that I’d agree with him on many things, but I get worn out after a couple paragraphs, his style is so elaborate.